Wednesday, March 1, 2000

Since
in addition to being a fiction writer Peter Plagens is also a painter and an
art critic, it’s tempting to judge his debut novel, Time for Robo, by its cover. Featuring just the title printed in
simple block letters, the book’s surface doesn’t go very far to recommend the
dense swirl of storytelling that lies just a few millimeters beneath. Which is
strange for an writer so obsessed with surfaces. But as Plagens illustrates, an
image, like a human life, is malleable and fleeting, and it’s the dimensions
that lie beyond the surface that give it its true character.

That’s not to say that Time for Robo comes alive as soon as you
open its cover. There are some interesting epigraphs at the beginning (one by
the Bee Gees) and a quite amusing Contents page, which features section and
chapter titles such as “Alas, Through the Looking Glass,” “Every Picture Stores
a Telly,” and “Time the End of Till.” But with the opening chapter, things look
as flat as the cover suggests.

Narrated by God, who’s somehow also
a computer, the chapter functions both as a kind of Semiotics for Dummies and as an apology for (and defense of) the
novel’s weaknesses. In order for us readers to understand him, sez God, He has
to narrow Himself down; He has to be imperfect—like a statue chipped from a
formless but all-encompassing piece of marble. I don’t know if Plagens thinks
people will actually fall for these kinds of tactics—if we’re supposed to think
that Time for Robo is as imperfect
as, say, the Statue of David—but maybe we should give him the benefit of the
doubt and assume he’s not just trying to put one over on us non-art-critic
types.

And then, somehow, things get
interesting. First there’s a writer named Billy Lockjaw, who’s working on a
novel (not quite the one we’re reading); and then there’s his novel (his second novel, whose chapters are printed
as if they’re the chapters of Time for
Robo); and then there are interjections from God, who reminds us
intermittently (and only somewhat annoyingly) that what we’re reading is
Billy’s work (and presumably not Plagens’). Who writes the chapters about Billy
is anybody’s guess, I guess, but soon it doesn’t really matter, because with
each new chapter, the layers of storytelling pile upon themselves until they
form a fairly intricate Möbius strip of narrative.

Part of the pleasure is that
Plagens’ themes—time, art, religion, the nature of reality, oral sex—build and
revolve around each other as intricately as the narratives do, and that with so
much to work with, the possible variations seem almost infinite, despite the
computer’s caveat. But then once the stories get moving, Plagens loses momentum
again as, instead of coming up with original variations, he begins to round up
all the usual suspects: There’s a Flemish painter whose painting alters itself
while he sleeps and then makes its way across several continents and centuries
(see Gaddis and Borges); a shadowy, unnamed agency that has its fingers in all
kinds of creepy technologies (see Pynchon); a cabal of Jesus freaks who become
coke-dealing computer programmers (see Pynchon again); and a man who’s
nicknamed Robo and whose father more or less lets the aforementioned agency
experiment on him (see Pynchon yet again) and who somehow has (or had) the
power to punch holes in time and disappear for split-seconds while he plays
basketball (see Vonnegut and—gasp—Tom Robbins?). Surrounding all this is the
narrative tension between Billy and God, which for all its cleverness is just a
pale version of the struggle in William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels between the Author (a computer
programmer) and Big George (an ostensibly omniscient electrical force).

In the end, Time for Robo is a brilliant and extremely provocative failure. The
diverging ends, which spin from such auspicious possibilities, are way too
loose to be reconciled; the Pynchonisms are way too transparent (and
incomplete) to be credible; and the out-and-out hands-in-the-air,
shoulder-shrugging I-give-up ending is hardly enough reward for finishing the
thing. But there are other rewards, and not just a few of them, embedded in
this mess of a novel. Most important is the simple fact that Plagens is such a
compelling storyteller that, despite everything, it’s hard to stop reading. Even
as he charts well-explored territory, he somehow comes up with fresh ways of
seeing—and telling—his stories. Which may not be enough reason to pick this
book up and make your way into its uninviting outer layers—but once you have,
you’ll find yourself constantly compelled to keep reading. Which I guess may be
recommendation enough.